Thoughts and News on Criminal Justice and Correctional Policy in California

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Solitary Confinement: What Could the Legislature Do?

Two months have passed since the joint legislative hearing held by the California Senate and Assembly Public Safety committees. At the hearing, lawmakers heard testimony from CDCR personnel, academics, and families of SHU inmates.

At the hearing, several of the lawmakers, especially Tom Ammiano, Loni Hancock, and Nancy Skinner spoke up about their discomfort with SHU conditions. If this is truly the zeitgeist in the legislature, what can they do to modify the conditions?

It is highly unrealistic that California will do away with solitary confinement altogether. Short of extreme creativity, it's hard to repurpose a maximum-security facility. Nor is it realistic to express political consensus that the institution is unnecessary. But there are various ways to mitigate our use of SHU units. Many of these are detailed in Confronting Confinement, a 2006 report by the U.S. Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons. In the California case, the legislature could decide to:

1. Limit long-term solitary confinement to, say, ten years.
2. Monitor the entrance to solitary confinement. One possibility would be to limit solitary to punishment for infractions, but if the legislature doesn't want to go that far, they could focus on demanding more evidence of danger before admitting someone to solitary confinement.
3. Monitor the exit from solitary confinement. The legislature could decide to abolish the debriefing process, or it could call for modifications, such as improving the criteria for establishing gang status.
4. Limit disciplinary measures. The legislature could flat-out forbid collective punishment, especially when race based.
5. Make a decision about double-bunking. I confess this one trumps me as well. Being locked up alone in a cell versus sharing it, in very close quarters, with a roommate not of one's choosing? This could be what Keramet Reiter once referred to as "differently horrible."
6. Add human contact, such as work with others or joint yard time.
7. Increase contact with the outside, including letters and visits.
8. Increase access to books and educational opportunities.
9. Set up parameters for safe and effective health care.
10. Seriously examine the quality of food and consider guidelines and improvements.
11. Take on the quality of staff training.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I don't see why solitary confinement should be "long-term" in the first place, except in very extreme cases related to inmate and staff safety. What would the magic number "10 years" accomplish that could not be accomplished in other, briefer and more humane ways? It is known that the validation process for suspected gang members is overly-zealous, catching within its net those who may be erroneously identified as active gang members by "snitches" who want to reduce their own sentences. Other criteria that earn points towards "validation" and being sent to a SHU are also unreliable, such as old gang tattoos that may not even be related to the inmate's current activities or self-identification. The criteria for leaving solitary situations such as the SHU's should be adjusted downwards, with positive reinforcement and an exit out of the SHU's offered at much briefer intervals than is currently the case.

"I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years. He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses that many of them have.

'Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone’s best interest,' he told me. He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. 'A bad violation should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go beyond that.'”

"John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. 'It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.' And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered."

"I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years. He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses that many of them have.

'Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone’s best interest,' he told me. He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. 'A bad violation should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go beyond that.'”

"John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. 'It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.' And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered."

Ocean, the New Yorker story you linked to is a classic and an example of excellent reporting. In fact, I credit much of the revival of interest in solitary confinement to its publication in 2009.

Anonymous, I agree. There's no magic to the 10-year limit. When I asked activists about it, the response I got was "you have to start somewhere." That strategy makes a lot of sense; progress in human rights is often incremental. Thing civil partnerships and how they led to marriage.

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